


If It's the Beaches

by warmommy



Category: Fury (2014)
Genre: F/M, super fluffy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-29
Updated: 2018-01-29
Packaged: 2019-03-10 22:17:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13510896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warmommy/pseuds/warmommy
Summary: “Zu Spät,” you said.Don nodded, his eyes drinking in the German tank and the woman in front of him. “’Too Late’, huh?”“By the time they can read that, yeah.” You looked over the boxy armoured vehicle, captured intact by yourself and the skeletal remains of your own crew. You smiled, bitter and mean and thirsty. “It’s way too fuckin’ late for them, then.”Or, how Don Collier met his wife and the mother of his son.





	If It's the Beaches

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AnaGP](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnaGP/gifts).



> Thanks for reading! You can find this and a lot more at my tumblr, warmommy.tumblr.com!

Master Sergeant pointed you out, although you were standing right beside him. “Sergeant Collier, the newest commander in the third platoon, Sergeant Y/N L/N, hers is. . .that Kraut shit, over there, the Tiger.”

“Zu Spät,” you said.

Don nodded, his eyes drinking in the German tank and the woman in front of him. “’Too Late’, huh?”

“By the time they can read that, yeah.” You looked over the boxy armoured vehicle, captured intact by yourself and the skeletal remains of your own crew. You smiled, bitter and mean and thirsty. “It’s way too fuckin’ late for them, then.” You stuck your hand out to him as Master Sergeant turned his head to some calamity or another. “Mostly, they call me Voodoo.”

“Wardaddy,” he responded in kind, gripping your hand through horse-skin gloves that didn’t do shit against the German wind. 

Your eyebrows leapt and your lips pursed. “That’s. . .that’s  _something_.”

“Daddy!” Gordo shouted from his seat. He was already hammered.

“Not now,” Don called back, his eyes still on you. “Well, Voodoo, listen quick, I’m gonna be honest with you. I hate the sight of that fuckin’ thing, but I’ve always wanted to see what’s on the inside. Care to give me a tour, ‘fore we roll out?”

With one last appraising glance, you jerked your head in the direction of ZU SPÄT, inviting him to walk ahead of you.

* * *

It only took one battle, one good fight, for Don to jump out of his beloved tank and run on unsteady legs past the geyser of fire that was the Panther the platoon had caught up with to ZU SPÄT and get on his fucking knees before the thing. He removed his helmet with shaking hands and he heard you saying his name again and again, felt you kneel beside him in the blood-soaked field. His eyes were wild, he knew, and he could hardly keep a breath, but he grabbed hold of the back of your neck and kept them trained on you.

“Jay, get me some coffee,” you called over your shoulder, not even flinching under Don’s unforgiving hand and gaze.

“You, you. . .” Don panted, getting crushingly close, pushing your helmet to the ground beside you. He pressed his forehead against yours and breathed hard against your face.

“It’s all right,” you said in a honeyed, softened voice, just the barest touch of your lips over his, an accident. “It’s  _allll_  right, Daddy-o. That’s what it’s for. That’s why it’s here.”

Every single one of his tanks was still in operational state, and he’d seen ground troops go down, sad as that was, but his boys, his Bible, his Coon Ass, his stupid fucking Norman, his Gordo--all living. That Panther was set to destroy, saw ZU SPÄT rolling up and geared up to take them all out, one by one. It was all over, he’d just  _known_. He saw a flash before his fucking eyes, just like when his back was burning, he was shouting at his men to escape through the emergency hatch and kicking Gordo out of his seat so that he himself could charge towards death.

Then that 88mm thundered, literally thundered and wrecked the air with pure  _sound_ , and one pointed shot at the rear panel, the whole fucking thing rocked, fire spewed, and everybody was still alive.

“They never fuckin’ knew what him ‘em,” you said slowly, that smile thirsty for blood and guts and suffering back, a shadow in your eye. “We’ll get ‘em every time.”

* * *

Born in New Orleans, he found out. Touches of magic in you. Your fingertips weaved something new out of the broken man he was. Adrenaline was what you called it, but adrenaline didn’t change what a man  _was_. Your crew and his got awful well acquainted while the two of you fucked on anything stationary, any flat enough surface or anything that wasn’t too uncomfortable against your backs. The whole platoon knew. The whole platoon watched him transform--no,  _transmute_. 

* * *

The war dragged on for another nine weeks, and OLD PHYLLIS was out of commission, but FURY still rolled, LUCY SUE was still going, and Boyd climbed out of his seat as soon as the word came over the comm and cried deep, tears spilling out onto the ground. Don looked back where ZU SPÄT pulled up the rear of his nearly-intact platoon and pointed at you, and you pointed back, smiling like God’s eyes. 

He told you everything that night. You were wearing his chevrons and nothing else, holding a bottle of wine from Poland, and, when you heard how he was roasted, heard about his dead would-be wife and little brother, how he’d killed them, you poured the wine out onto the grass beside you, then crawled over him.

His body was yours. His mind was yours. His heart was yours. His soul was yours. You held them in your hands just as you did him, and you came again, rolling your hips on top of him. You called him Don, not Daddy-o.

* * *

By the time you were floating across the Atlantic together, you were sick. You blamed it on seasickness, motion sickness, but Don hoped and he hoped. He hoped as hard as he ever had, standing behind you as you leaned over the edge and groaning at the ocean. Don lifted your hair off your neck to help cool you down.

He never did imagine it would happen this way, but it did. 

“I want you to be my wife,” he’d said.

You’d gagged one more time, your whole body still sagged against the railing. You’d come up wiping your mouth and nodding. “Yeah, d’accord. I want you to be my husband. Oh, God, move!” 

Don had been unable to do anything but laugh and smile while you puked your guts up into the Atlantic.

* * *

Donald Ericcson Collier, junior, was born on Valentine’s Day, 1946, in a Catholic hospital in New Orleans, just like his mama. It was seventeen hours from start to finish, and Don thought he’d be ready, but he wasn’t. Nothing in Africa or Europe had ever been so terrifying as his wife’s tears, the concentration of pain on your face. Don had no family or friends present to show off his little son, the boy he’d always assumed he’d have with Rose, but he had his  _own_  little family in the room. 

He was holding tiny Don in his arms in a chair beside your bed, and you were out of your mind with painkillers.

“Traverse left,” you muttered, then took a deep breath and fell back asleep.

Don chuckled, bouncing your son just slightly on his chest, and kissed his forehead again. “Boy, your mama’s a sight. You oughta thank her.”

* * *

You stopped sleeping in the bed with him after the baby’d been home for a few weeks. At first, Don said nothing, although he missed you like Heaven and death. He woke up one night and you weren’t in the room at all. He glanced over at the bassinet and little Don was sleeping with his mouth wide open, just like his daddy, and then he got out of bed to look for you. 

He found you at the kitchen table, your head over your folded arms, crying softly, quietly. 

“Hey, Voo.” Don touched your back and sat down next to you where y’all usually ate breakfast. “This where you been?”

You nodded. 

“Don’t cry, sweetheart. Everything’s right as it should be.”

“I remember them, I can still hear ‘em. . .” you shook, and Don grew passively teary-eyed himself. Yeah, he knew what that felt like. “I feel like I don’t belong here. I feel like he doesn’t belong in my arms.”

“I know,” Don spoke calmly. “He seems too good to be true, and you never could trust a thing that was too good to be true. Got people hurt. Got people killed.”

“I should’ve died with ‘em,” you whispered, still shaking in one of his shirts. “When we took ZU SPÄT. I never belonged at the top.”

“Not true, Voodoo.” He coiled an arm gentle around you and your chair dragged with a light squeak towards his. “He’s your boy, my boy, too. Conceived after I would have  _died_  without you. Everything that led up to that point, the men we lost, we could’ve done things different, sometimes, yeah, but you did take that tank, and that’s how we’re here, now. You saved my life, you saved my boys, you saved a thousand lives, keeping us all together and rolling to get to that crossroads, and all them Germans, they knew it was too late as soon as they saw you, that SS battalion. When I think back and realise you were holding my little boy inside you at that very moment. . .”

“I don’t mean that I don’t love him,” you sobbed. 

“I know,” he whispered over your head, and kissed your hair. “We don’t live in mud and blood and tears no more. He’s yours. You protected him so well. Tough as nails, never complained. . .” Don closed his eyes, feeling the heat rise from your skin. “I love you, Voo.”

“I love you, too.”

Feeling those words, Don slowly stood, bringing you up with him. “Come on, let’s rest.”

You smiled when you looked down in that white bassinet. You smiled like God’s eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! You can find this and a lot more at my tumblr, warmommy.tumblr.com!


End file.
